Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  I sometimes imagined that my belief extended me at least to the edges of Bucharest, to the railway lines and ringed roads that surrounded it like the hard membrane around a cell. With its demented and chaotic traffic, its industrial platforms, where every piece of every machine was long ago used up, both physically and morally, its universities and libraries where lichen blossomed in a thousand colors and species, its statues (ah, its statues!) that stop you cold, its Dâmboviţa and Colentina like capillaries knitted from cholesterol, its center of cubist apartment blocks crystallized around melancholy-soaked residents, its women with tattooed hips wandering the streets at random, shaded by flowering lindens – the city would become my own artificial body. I would name it with my name and dampen it with my desires. I would control the crawling of scorpions and vampires through its river-rock wells, I would calculate the trajectories of every drop of urine sprayed from the drunkard’s meatus onto a wall, his head against its frozen bricks, I would passionately play with the forms of the clouds, broken by the parabolic antennae of the Telephone Palace, I would mold them into matchsticks, spiders, Jehovahs, thumbtacks, I would make their puffiness write awful insults across the evening sky … I would immediately prohibit the production of estrogen hormones in all genital apparatuses, in people, rats, flies, and all other beings, and over the years, I would follow the course of the world’s deconstruction through angelification … I would transform Orthodox churches into semitransparent jellyfish, their flesh would show their icons like diffuse granules of gold and azure, priests in cassocks would be vacuoles and organelles slowly pulsing around the altar, and the parishioners would be filiform like an El Greco – with ragged fringes, pale, carrying batteries of murderous cells on their white vestments. And hundreds of churches would rise slowly over the ocean floor, among the blocks, their cupolas throbbing, their rainbow lace fluttering, ever higher through the pure air, scraping the skin of the city’s living flesh, until, with the unseen hands of belief, I would gather the group of felt-lined bells into one place, I would combine the fungi into each other, I would crush them gently, like grapes, until in the cup of my hand there would be a single, great bell of blue gelatin, smelling of myrrh, incense, and narcissus, with which I would wash my flashing eyes.

  Oh Lord, solitude is just another name for insanity. I know full well that I will never be able to change, with my will, even the decay of my teeth. I know that I will never have dominion over even a tenth of my own body. As for what is outside of it – but what is outside? Without the photons that fall on objects and ricochet into the crystal of my eyes – ugly spheres stuck in the bone of my brain – the world would be an obscure heap of reverberations, like the spider’s world, where only whatever shakes their derisory web exists. What is frightening for me, in the image of death, is not non-being, but being without being, the terror of the life of a mosquito larva, an earthworm, a snail at the bottom of the abyss, the living and unconscious flesh with which we are all cobbled together. We perceive light with scaly eggs full of gelatin, we transform it into electrical impulses and transfer them to a mound of wet mucilage in a calcium shell. We will never know how a wavelength becomes a subjective sensation, how we see (Lord, how do we see?) the petal of a snapdragon. We can never understand how something may exist and yet we never see, hear, taste, smell, or touch it even once in our life. Our life – within the limits of our universe, wearing our corpse like a headscarf, like the starry bandages on a mummy. Our world – the field of our sensations. A puffy fungus of light that covers our pupils, the sonorous felt that grows on our temples. A lover’s nipples recalled by our fingertips. Our tongue like an orchid’s peduncle, our tongue painted not red, but sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. And the trees, made of madrepore, splattered with mucus, unleashing their crowns into our nasal passages. And rocks of limestone in the cells of the inner ears. And the peduncles that know cold and hot, all scattered like transparent drops of glue onto the network of our nerves. Sometimes I imagine I have been bathed in a corrosive liquid, one that dissolved my flesh, my skeleton, and my internal organs, sparing only my nervous system. Then I would be taken out and stretched over a glass lamella, with every little fiber of nerve stretched, with billions of branches unrolled around me like a thin undershirt, white and impossible to tear. What else would I be but a neuron, with a brain as my cellular body, spinal marrow as my axons, and nerves as my numberless dendrites? A spiderweb that feels only what touches it. Yes, each of us have a single neuron within us, and humanity is a dissipated brain that strives desperately to come together. And I wonder, quaking inside, whether the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the dead are nothing more than this: the extraction of this neuron from every person that ever lived, their evaluation, and the rejection of the unviable into the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and construction of an amazing brain – new, universal, blinding – from the perfect neurons, and with this brain we will climb, unconscious and happy, onto a higher level of the fractal of eternal Being. But what about the “unviable”? But what about the minds, souls, and sensations of murderers and sinners? Won’t they form, in Gehenna, an infinitely perverse brain, a monster, something that could make Leonardo’s combination of all the most hideous parts of the beings of the dark seem as beautiful as an archangel? And won’t this process continue, even in the superior world – the old quarrel, the eternal quarrel? Because eternal torture, the unending pain that is evil, the wailing and gnashing of teeth caused by the inability to be good, aren’t these still a form of existence, and as existence, aren’t they also endlessly beautiful? Separated by centrifugal force, in the great turbine of Dante, or through fractional distillation in the Deisis of Byzantine icons, Inferno and Paradiso, layer of perfumed oil over layer of stinking pitch, all these in the end are all wisdom. Paradise – the wisdom of the right hand, right hemisphere, feminine, gentle and puffy, endless, still waters, illuminated in their depths by the phosphorescence of terrifying abyssal fish … Hell – wisdom of the left hand, left hemisphere, sudden paracletian fire, the mask that covers, in the crux of destruction, the soul of a dove. Good and evil, two enormous Buddhas erupting over our lives from two volcanoes over our lives, opposing and yet similar principles like magnetic poles, in the end they couple, over a footbridge of nervous fibers, to make the motionless and complicated hemispheres of the great, incomparable Brain that dreams us all.

  We will get there. Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem … And we will get there because we are there already, because we have a toehold, because we are amphibious, because, paradoxically and miraculously, we are already part of the machinery that invents us from moment by moment, we participate second by second in our own drawing, sculpting, conception, and knitting together. If this wasn’t so, we wouldn’t be able to move a finger, since the finger’s flesh, cartilage, and bone would not be obliged to heed our command. Because we already participate in the Divine, from everywhere, from the tufts of our armpits, from the fat of our hips, and especially from the shell on our shoulders, we emanate a scented light that envelops us like a weaver’s shuttle. It is the mandorla that will someday lift us toward the sky, the shell that seats a living embryo. Yes, we are neural embryos, tadpoles caught in atavistic organs, belonging to two environments at once, two zones of being at once. How strange we will be when, like cetaceans, we complete our departure from the firm earth of inert flesh and adapt to the new kingdom, where we will bathe in the mental fluid of an enormous knowing, completely one with it and lost within it, like transparent animalcules of plankton, or like a single animalcule filling the entire ocean, indiscernible from it, a marine flea with trawlers and fishing boats sailing on its back …

  It is almost six in the evening of a late and suffocating summer … One thousand, nine hundred, eighty-six years ago a prophet came from Judea. After thirty-three years he was crucified, and after another three days he rose and ascended to heaven, not before he promised to return. So far, though, he hasn’t. I attribute this delay t
o the fact that, as you have seen, I still have perplexing hands. I have not yet been transformed, in the wink of an eye, and I have not yet seen a new earth and new heaven …

  I SIT in my chair for a little while longer, in my attic with the oval window, on the edge of a galaxy. A quiet grows rosier as evening falls, interwoven with volatile and benign noises: the continuous song of the doves (they often stop on the ledge and peer a round eye into the cave behind my window), toilets flushing in other apartments, the limpid cries of the boys playing soccer between cars parked in front of the block … Now I am writing in the heart of the night. The little lamp on my desk is no brighter than a wick in oil, so it leaves the corners of my room dark, and my bed disappears into a triangle of pitch. The haze of alcohol fills the room, alcohol and sweat. Because in my home, in my bed, for the first time after months and months, someone is here, completely obliterated by the dark. If I push my head and shoulders out of the sphere of yellow light over the desk and accustom my eyes, slowly, to the tenebrous air, I think I can make out a crumpled structure, an engraver’s needle cobweb, a plaque almost unattacked by acid. After a long time, I perceive the phantom-like cloud of a crumpled sheet, veiling and simultaneously unveiling a human form. It all looks like a heavy plaster cast thrown onto the plank bed, a statue that creaks and bows the slats. But Herman is light, a skeleton that the wrapper of his skin can barely hold together, glued tight to his skull and flapping free everywhere else, because his metabolism is a haze of alcohol vapors. “Poor him,” Mamma said twenty years ago, “so young and polite, he tells me ‘kiss the hand’ ten times a day when we pass on the elevator or the stairs – poor kid, look how he ended up, look what drinking will do to a person …” But I, holding her hand, without imagining I would one day know Herman as well as I do myself, looked with fright over my shoulder, toward the entryway, where I could still see the drunk, unnaturally hunched over, silhouetted by the weak light of the yellow and red elevator bulb. His neck was at a right angle to his body, as though one of his cervical vertebra had bent his spinal cord horizontal, and his head, always looking at the ground, was the image of oriental humility. Whenever we met, he scared me, because all drunks scared me, they were strange animals – I heard them sometimes howling and cursing behind the block – and, even though Herman was gentleness itself, when he put his hand on top of my head, I jumped and Mamma pulled me close. He still wouldn’t take his hand off my hair, cut short, with bangs, and, if the elevator was coming from the seventh floor, he might stay like that for more than a minute. During this time he would gaze at us, in the shadow of the stairway, revealing very, very blue eyes beneath his eyebrows, grimacing with the effort of looking straight ahead. His face was handsome and young, intelligent, but his breath, reeking of vodka, made us hold on to each other for the entire time that, crowded in the elevator, it took to reach the fifth floor. When we closed the metal door behind us, with its crack of matte glass, and we stepped onto our calming landing, in front of apartment 20, we breathed deeply a few times, while Mamma unlocked the door and the elevator went another two floors higher, with Herman.

  Aside from the customary “kiss the hand, ma’am,” he never opened his mouth, but he smiled at me and absentmindedly patted the top of my head. He always wore the same suit, dark and proper, with a white shirt open at the neck, showing a little of the soft, rosy skin of his chest. He was always drunk, and when we went shopping with Mamma, on Lizeanu, we could usually spot him in the bar, wasting his time with ordinary drunkards, but Herman never trembled. He never rambled when he spoke, and he never left his clothes undone or dirty. He was so different from Mimi and Lumpă’s father, a porcine gypsy, who would come home with a train of musicians playing the violin and accordion, while he howled his favorite song as best he could:

  On my mother’s grave, on her grave

  If tonight I don’t get you

  Naked in your slippers

  I hope this slum gets the plague

  with his pants around his ankles, smacking the balloon of his hairy paunch! Or the drunk on Stairway 3, an old man in a gray hat who would pull out his little black worm and urinate like a racehorse with a thick jet onto the pillars in the hall, right in the middle of the kids playing in furniture boxes.

  The young man lived with an aged peasant mother in a studio on the top floor of the block on Ştefan cel Mare. The elevator only went to the seventh floor, and then you took the stairs to get to his miniscule landing, shared by the apartment’s door, the always-barred metal door to the elevator motor, and the laundry door with a transparent window. The fourth door, for me the most mysterious one by far, led to the rooftop terrace. In fact, that landing (and not only the landing) was connected to concentric mysteries, ever more troubling, ever deeper … I had moved to the block on Ştefan cel Mare when I was five, and the immensity of its stairways, hallways, and floors had given me, for some years, a vast and strange terrain to explore. I went back there many times, in reality and dreams, or better put, within a continuum of reality-hallucination-dream, without ever knowing why the vision of that long block, with eight stairways, with the mosaic of its panoramic window façade, with magical stores on the ground floor: furniture, appliances, TV repair – always filled me with emotion. I could never look at that part of the street with a quiet eye. If I were to take a picture, I am sure it would show something completely different: between the enormous, scarlet castle of the Dâmboviţa mill, with its pediments and crenulations shooting toward the sky, and the sea of roofs and yellow, cubic buildings, pink, or calcio-vecchio cubic buildings of Bucharest beyond the street, there would only be an empty lot, maybe some piles of rusty tram rails, or concrete forms, or purely and simply a yellow pool, refracting the yellow clouds pouring over it … The block, the Police watchtower next to it, the Circus alley and its blue mushroom cap surrounded by poplars whose branches were held in a Renaissance entrelac (and which had grown enormously over the years: summer, from my parents’ apartment balcony, through the snowfall of poplar tufts, the tree growth kept me from seeing anything of the alley, but the tallest dusty pediment of the mill) seemed actually to live only in my mind, sprung pale and ghostly, from an emotional abyss. Everything is strange, because everything is from long ago, and because everything is in that place where you can’t tell dreams from memory, and because these large zones of the world were not, at the time, pulled apart from each other. And to experience the strangeness, to feel an emotion, to be petrified before a fantastical image always means one and the same thing: to regress, to turn around, to descend back into the archaic quick of your mind, to look with the eyes of a human larva, to think something that is not a thought with a brain that is not yet a brain, and which melts into a quick of rending pleasure which we, in growing, leave behind. In countless dreams I entered Stairway 4 of the block on Ştefan cel Mare, the way it was in the first months when we moved there: the hallway full of debris, the metal panel with little letter-box doors on a different wall than it is on today, a mysterious cell, full of magazines and packages, that doesn’t exist anymore – or maybe it never did – and the monumental steps up to the elevator door. Everything is vast, like in a basilica, solemn and frightening. More terrible still is the great white opening of the elevator shaft, before the car was installed. There is no door, just a rectangular opening in a wall. I go up the steps full of stone chips and whitewashed lime, surrounded by a kind of enchantment. I stop in the immense portal and look up the enormous, astounding well, with cable viscera hanging against the walls. The infinite height makes me nauseous, I squat down and feel someone yank me backwards. It is Mamma, who takes me by the hand and we climb the stairs, full of the same debris, sometimes so much that we have to clamber over the gray mounds. In between the landings with apartment doors are others, empty, sinister, with little windows where you can see the mill, and through one door alone, the incinerator. The incinerator already emits a revolting stench, since many families have moved to the block long before the construction was completed.
I am more afraid of the empty landings than of those with apartments, even though each door is different there, even though great crates have appeared with cacti or oleanders, and a few grimy pictures are stuck to the walls. If I weren’t with my mother, I would never get home, because it seems certain that the floors continue above and below endlessly. Lost on empty landings, I shout desperately, until I lose my voice, weak with fear and strangeness. We do, in the end, get home. Mamma unlocks the door, twisting the security key in the keyhole that makes the wings of the little pieces inside pull back slowly. Only then does she unlock it with the real key. We enter the vast, empty rooms, and then into the front room. The evening is dark. In the triple window, a blood-colored cloud hangs over the city. Luminous billboards, very far away, flash on and off. In the room the only furniture is a bed and a chair. The walls are unpainted and two black, stunted wires cross the ceiling like spider legs. We don’t yet have electricity. Mamma, young and beautiful, lights a candle and sticks it to a saucer. We don’t have curtains, and the window is splashed with lime. We sit on the bed, embracing, and I melt from love and magic. Along the window only the stripe of clotted blood remains a while, and the rest is night. And the round, weak light of the candle, in prismatic needles, refracts in the window. It is a beautiful and sad quiet. I huddle against my mother’s body, and we watch the stripe of blood slowly disappear …